rchitecture is not like sausage, something you are inclined to like only if you don't know how it's made. The process by which architecture is made is actually quite enticing. And most people don't know the first thing about it. Even people who love buildings tend to see them as pure and perfect finished objects, not as the product of months, even years, of anguish, debate, and trial and error. Accident can determine architectural form as much as intention, and who is to say how and why an architect prefers one shape over another?

''Frank O. Gehry: Outside In,'' by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan, does more to address these questions than any book I know that has been written for adults. This is not a biography for children, though it contains a great deal of information about Gehry's life, and it is not a guide to his buildings, though there are spectacular color photographs of many of his best works, including the extraordinary Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, the project that has probably done more than any other single building to make architecture a subject of wide popular passion today.

This book is a journey through the creative process. It is the best introduction to Gehry's architecture that we have. Maybe I should go farther and say it is one of the best introductions to architecture that we have. Like many of the best children's books, ''Frank O. Gehry: Outside In'' gets to the heart of its subject without any of the obfuscations of books written for adults. It brings you into Gehry's life and into his work, and it addresses the way each of these things has affected the other.

The authors, who also wrote a remarkable book about the artist Chuck Close, do use Gehry's life for a kind of basic narrative structure. We are told, often in his own words, about his childhood in Canada, about his family's financial woes, about his life as a truck driver as his family attempted an economic recovery in Los Angeles, and then about his growing awakening to architecture in general and to the artistic culture of Southern California in particular. ''As he searched for his own style, he realized he had more in common with the methods of cutting-edge West Coast artists than with the standard fare of other architects,'' the authors say. And then they quote Gehry: ''The artists were working with inexpensive materials -- broken wood and paper -- and they were making beauty.''

Gehry is an easy conversationalist, not the prima donna his recent celebrity might suggest, and his words are often endearing. In one of my favorite sections, Greenberg and Jordan ask Gehry about his own house in Santa Monica, a conventional Dutch colonial that he covered with chain-link fencing, plywood and corrugated metal. ''Buildings look more interesting before they are finished,'' Gehry says, explaining why he left the ceiling beams and joists and some of the pipes exposed. ''If things look good when they are installed, why cover them up?''

I am not sure how easy it is for children to understand what Gehry means when he says: ''Life is chaotic, dangerous and surprising. Buildings should reflect it.'' But I know that this remark can provoke a fascinating conversation among all but the youngest children about why certain buildings appeal to them and others do not, and how accurately it takes us into Gehry's way of thinking. Greenberg and Jordan understand that Gehry is not some kind of crazy sculptor, but very much an architect who is concerned with fulfilling the needs of his clients, and they devote a fair amount of space to explaining exactly how he does this and comes up with buildings that look so different from everybody else's.

Their book includes several of Gehry's best projects from the days before he became an international superstar, like the law school of Loyola University in downtown Los Angeles, a village of simple shapes arranged around a small public square, which they juxtapose with a photograph of the Roman Forum, making the connection absolutely clear. Gehry loved the way the Forum was a collection of pieces, many in ruins, and the way it tied his project, symbolically at least, to the origins of the law.

For one of his residential clients, who warmly remembered growing up near the Griffith Park Observatory in Los Angeles, Gehry designed a house that is also a kind of village, but with a copper dome over the largest section to echo the observatory. ''I try to realize my clients' fantasies and create something special for them,'' Gehry is quoted as saying in a chapter that I love most of all for its title: ''Every Building Has a Story.''

Most important of all, Greenberg and Jordan make clear how slow and difficult the design process is. ''After a number of quick sketches Gehry makes the first of many models,'' they write. ''Again and again he revises. 'I'll move a wall on a model, look at it for two weeks, then move it again. And I worry about things. I'm like a mother hen.' ''

''Outside In'' is illustrated with a mix of first-rate color photographs (including a superb set of the Guggenheim in Bilbao), Gehry's own drawings, and computer-generated drawings that explain the role of software in creating many of Gehry's unusual shapes. It ends with a discussion of Gehry's struggle, after the acclaim of Bilbao, to avoid being pushed into making the same building over and over again. This may be one of the few books for young readers to address honestly not just the payoffs of artistic success but also the risks.

Readers who are not ready for ''Frank O. Gehry: Outside In'' (probably anyone under the age of 10) may well enjoy Michael J. Crosbie and Steve and Kit Rosenthal's ''Arches to Zigzags,'' a kind of architectural dictionary in rhyme. The world does not need another A B C book, but this one is so beautifully photographed, and so clever in its choices, that you cannot not make room for it on your shelf. ''W,'' for example, doesn't stand for window, but for widow's walk, which is illustrated by an elegant 1819 house in Salem, Mass., while ''R'' is for ruin, shown by the Wupatki National Monument, a 12th-century site in Arizona. The architectural terms are illustrated with color images of buildings as different as H. H. Richardson's Ames Free Library in North Easton, Mass. (''arch''), an Art Deco hotel in Miami Beach (''neon'') and the John Hancock Center in Chicago (''X-bracing''), and the rhymes are clear, fun and not too cute.

Alas, there are no limits to cuteness in ''Roberto the Insect Architect,'' by Nina Laden. This is the tale of a termite who wants to be an architect so he can follow in the footsteps of ''Hank Floyd Mite and Fleas van der Rohe.'' Those names tell you all you need to know about this rather insipid story, which is mainly a string of puns that exist solely to amuse adults, or children whose reading level is light-years beyond this. Roberto defies his fellow termites, who doubt that he can become an architect, and after he makes it big he gets the rewards of a television interview with Barbara Waterbugs and an offer for the film rights to his life from Steven Shieldbug.